PC:
What are your theories or speculations about the reason for the rise of the
New Formalism?

LT:
During all the poetic fads and foibles of the second half of the twentieth
century there were certain poets who steadfastly continued to write
excellent formal poetry. Some who come to mind are Dick Wilbur, Howard
Nemerov, De Snodgrass, Don Justice, and Joe Kennedy who provided fine
examples to, and taught, many young people. Others who started out as
formalists gave up and, for a while at least, turned into imitation Beat
poets: Karl Shapiro, Don Hall, Jim Wright and Bob Mezey, for instance.

And then The Book of
Forms came along. Just this spring Wesli and I celebrated its fortieth
anniversary in two places: at SUNY Oswego on April 23rd where the creative
writing program I founded is also forty years of age, and at the Newburyport
Writers’ Festival where I gave a reading from poems by Wesli and me
published in TBoF. There was no book remotely like it for thirteen
years, until 1981 when John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason appeared.

The Book of Forms never
sold many copies annually, but it sold between 1200-1500 copies steadily. If
you multiply 1200 copies by forty years, you come up with around 50,000
copies sold. And many of these copies were passed around, used in
classrooms, given as gifts, so it circulated widely.

Apparently a fair number
of copies of the original edition are still around. At Newburyport this
spring a performance poet, Johnny Longfellow, asked me if I’d sign his first
edition copy, and it was a true first edition, not one of the reprint
copies. I got a kick out of that. It was a bit dog-eared but still quite
usable. Another person asked me if I would sign her hardbound copy of the
third edition. I asked her where she’d gotten it because it had gone out of
print almost as soon as it appeared. Jim Lehrer of PBS wrote me at my Mathom
Bookshop to ask for one and I had to tell him that the only copy I could
find on the Internet would cost him $95.00.

Then, from 1983-1986,
when I was doing the annual poetry book roundup for the Dictionary of
Literary Biography Yearbooks I began to notice that there were more
books of traditionally formal poetry being published. I drew attention to
them and called the beginning of the movement “Neoformalism.”

PC:
When your poem, “November 22, 1963,” became a ballet, what input, if any,
did you have in the process? A dance ensemble performed my long poem, “The
House,” and I was invited to watch them put it together, invited to comment.

LT:
No, that came out of the blue. The poem originally appeared in the J.F.K.
memorial issue of Poetry in 1964, and it was widely reprinted thereafter,
here and abroad. Brian Macdonald, at that time choreographer and director of
the Royal Swedish Ballet, wrote to ask if I’d give him permission to quote
from the poem on programs and to use a phrase, “While the Spider Slept,” as
the title for his ballet. Of course I said yes.

PC:
Would you tell us about the evolution of your interest in dialogue that led
to The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction,
Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, published by University Press of New
England, in 2004?

LT:
That book was a fluke, a most fortunate one. Writer’s Digest Books wrote to
ask me if I’d be willing to write a book on poetry writing. I signed a
contract to do so, and then they canceled the project for some reason and
asked if I’d be interested in substituting a manuscript on writing dialogue
or on plot, I believe it was. I chose dialogue.

I wrote the book
practically overnight, but I included in it everything else there was about
writing fiction as well. Dialogue came out in 1989, went through any number
of printings and several editions here and abroad including one in Italian,
and it was finally dropped in this country after the turn of the century.
The University Press of New England picked it up, asked me to revise it to
include other genres, like scriptwriting and poetry, and brought out The
Book of Dialogue in 2004 as a companion volume to The Book of Forms
and The Book of Literary Terms. In its various incarnations
Dialogue has sold more copies since 1989 than The Book of Forms
has since 1968.

PC:
In the interview with Donald Masterson, titled “Making the Language Dance
and Go Deep,” published in l980 in The Cream City Review of the
University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, vol. 8, nos. 1-2, 1983, now available on
your blog, you said that Whitman "was much more interested in his ‘message’
than in the language that carried the message. Do you think it is especially
difficult to write good political poetry?

LT:
Indeed I do. The danger is always that the writer of a political “poem” gets
so wound up in his or her topic and theme that he or she forgets that poetry
is that genre which focuses primarily on language. Poetry is language art.

PC:
Whose poems that have a political theme would you recommend?

LT:
Probably Yeats. He never forgot that poetry was language. Maybe some Auden.
Other poets who wrote political poetry sometimes were Kipling and Tennyson.
For the life of me, I can’t think of an American I’d recommend. Of course
Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich wrote not very good political poetry —
Rich was one of those traditionally formal poets who in the ‘sixties jumped
ship into the Beat boat. In my opinion that’s when she stopped being a poet.

PC:
I was interested in learning that your mother taught you how to bind books,
and that you bound your paperbacks in college. Would you tell us about some
of the books you've done, the LBJ, perhaps, or others?

LT:
You’re talking about one of my favorite stories from my time in the book
trade: I ran a summer bookshop in Maine from 1979 to 1996 when I retired
from teaching, and then I went full-time and on-line until the end of 2006.
Before the shop, though, I was a book collector and scout.

It was a late colleague
of mine at the State University of New York College at Oswego who got me
started as a bookseller. His name was David Winslow. He had a Ph.D. in
folklore, but he had had several other careers as well, including selling
antiques and books. He taught me what I know about books as a commodity when
he and I, on weekends mostly, became what are known as “book scouts.” We
would sell the books we found upstate to downstate New York book dealers.

One day Dave called me up
to say that there was a big sale of stuff in Hannibal, not far from Oswego.
He said that they’d advertised books, but when we got there all we found of
books was a box of paperbacks under one table. Dave sneered and walked away
to look at other things, but I went through the paperbacks and found one, a
first edition paperback original titled My Hope for America by Lyndon
Baines Johnson. I bought it for ten cents.

When we got back to the
car Dave saw that I’d bought something, asked to see it, and then began to
rag me about it. All I’d paid for it was a dime, but he acted as though I’d
thrown away a fortune. By the time we got back to my house I was furious and
had decided that I would wreak my revenge.

I took the Johnson book,
quarter-bound it in cloth and leather, put it in a package with an old
leather-bound hymnal that I had restored, and sent it with return postage to
former President Lyndon Johnson. In an enclosed letter I asked him if he
would be willing to sign my book in exchange for the hymnal, which I hoped
he would accept as a gift.

Not a great while after
that I got the book back. President Johnson had signed a Presidential
bookplate for me, and he included a letter on official stationery telling me
that he was delighted with the hymnal, which he was going to place in the L.
B. J. Presidential Library in Texas. I pasted the bookplate onto the
inside-front cover of My Hope for America, and I tipped his letter
into the volume. Then I called David and asked him to come over to the house
so that I could show him a book I had picked up for ten cents at a lousy
sale in Hannibal. Later on, I sold the book for a lot of money on one of our
downstate book trips.

PC:
What sort of stories did you write?

LT:
The stories I wrote as a child were always fantasies. I read a lot of
fantasy and science fiction as a kid. In high school a bunch of us formed a
“science-fiction reading club,” The Fantaseers. Its library was in my house,
the parsonage, and I was the librarian. I’ve written about it in
Fantaseers, A Book of Memories, published by Star Cloud in 2005. There’s
a picture of the library (one bookcase) in Fantaseers. The distaff members
of our gang called themselves The Reesatnafs, which is Fantaseers spelled
backwards. When we all got together we were the Fantatnafs. Many of us,
those who are living, are still friends (some of us, including my wife Jean
and me, married within the gang), and we stay in touch even fifty-six years
after our graduation.

PC:
Can you put your finger on why you made the switch to poetry as what you
wanted to concentrate on writing?

LT:
There were two reasons: First, I couldn’t break myself of the habit of
writing fantasy. I was writing poetry at the same time, so I just shifted
the weight of my writing to poetry rather than fiction, though one of my
high school English teachers, Mary Flynn, suggested that I could make more
money writing fiction than poetry. And in the Navy, where I was a yeoman (a
clerk, not an English farmer!) it was easier to write the shorter genre than
the longer one.

PC:
Do you see that as a blessing or a curse?

LT:
I don’t know. I published my first short story (it won third prize in a high
school fiction contest when I was a freshman) in my home town newspaper in
1949, and I’ve continued to write fiction on and off over the years, much of
it published in magazines and some of it even in anthologies and one high
school textbook. Most of the stories are still fantasies, but they call such
productions “magic realism” now, and it’s fashionable since Marquez.

I’ve never published a
collection, although one was supposed to come out last year, The Museum
of Ordinary People and Other Stories. My publisher keeps assuring me it
will appear, but maybe there IS a curse on my fiction. Star Cloud has
decided instead to bring out my nonfiction book first, this month (May):
Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New
England 1580-1697. Even that one was written over thirty years ago.

PC:
Do you advise young poets to keep even their failures in a file as a record
of their writing?

LT:
No. Failures are failures.

PC:
Do you write using a computer?

LT:
Yes, I do. What that does, though, is eliminate drafts. I used to be able to
look back and see what I’d changed. Now, unless I run off a hard copy at
each stage of revision, there’s no record.

PC:
Do you think the use of computers has influenced poetry writing? If so, how?

LT:
This question came up at the Newburyport Literary Festival on Friday, April
25th 2008 when Dana Gioia moderated a discussion among Rhina Espaillat, the
honoree of the Festival, X. J. Kennedy, and me. In my case, the computer
liberated me. I bought one pretty early on, in 1982, and what it did for me
was eliminate all the labor involved in rewriting. Then, of course, later on
the Internet was born, thereby opening up all sorts of things, from that
rhyming dictionary we mentioned earlier, to publishing on-line. I have a
wonderful time with my blog. I’ve resurrected many of my ancient works and
posted them for whole new generations to read.

PC:
A related question, what influence, if any, do you think that the Internet
will have — or has had — on poetry? I’m thinking about internet writing
communities and workshops, literary blogs, and internet periodicals.

LT:
It’s already had a profound effect. There’s a lot of interest in poetry all
over the internet, but not all of it is good. There’s a lot of dumbness out
there. People who have published one or two poems here or there, in print or
cyberspace, think they are experts and feel free to express their opinions
at any time and anywhere to anyone. But speaking for myself, I’m having a
lovely time with my blog.